Aaron frowned. ‘Have you ever heard of the term, “grooming”?’ he said.
‘I told you,’ Rosemary said. ‘I’ve got a fourteen-year-old daughter.’
‘There you go then,’ Aaron shrugged.
‘What on earth would André be grooming me for?’ she said.
‘I told you. Burglary! Rape! There’s nothing to say an artist can’t be a serial killer, is there? In fact, Hitler was an artist. Grown women go missing after meeting dodgy men on the Internet all the time. It really isn’t that difficult to fool someone, you know. What does he know about you? He knows that you speak French, so he talks to you in French. You’re
half French, so he tells you he lives in Bordeaux. You probably told him, somewhere along the line, that you like Picasso. Now he’s an expert on Picasso. They tell you what they know you want to hear. People like you are too trusting.’
‘It’s none of your business anyway,’ Rosemary said.
Aaron shook his head. He was frustrated now. ‘I didn’t ask to be here, did I?’ he said. ‘I could have had you up and running by now. If you hadn’t handcuffed me to the chair I’d be gone. You could have been online, talking to lover boy, talking to Jean Pierre.’
‘He’s not a boy,’ Rosemary said. ‘He’s not my lover, either.’
‘You don’t really know what he is, do you?’ Aaron said. The metal cuff was beginning to bite at his wrist. The feathers were aggravating his skin. The clock said it was gone twelve. He already had more money than he knew what to do with. He wanted to go now. ‘How about you unlock the cuffs?’ he said. ‘I’ll fix the connection and there’ll be no more said about it.’
Rosemary looked thoughtful. She slid off the edge of the desk and stood facing him, calmly considering his offer.
‘What do you think?’ he said, encouraging her. ‘What happens in the French translator’s office stays in the French translator’s office.’ He smiled.
The woman wiped at the dark make-up smudge on her cheekbone, spreading the stain further across her face. ‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I forgot to bring you your tea.’ She marched out of the room. Aaron bit his bottom lip.
Torture
When Rosemary got back to the office five minutes later, she was holding a mug and a plate of Viennese Whirls. She put the biscuits down on the desk. ‘How dare you insult my intelligence!’ she shrieked. She was angry at the repairman’s comment about her not knowing who André really was. She was angry because he was right. She’d been the first to mention Picasso. He’d asked her who her favourite artists were. She hadn’t known much about art then. She’d said Picasso because there was an article about him in the newspaper on her desk. She glared at the repairman, her hand shaking. Tea splashed on to the laminate floor.
‘How dare you call me stupid? I’m not stupid! I’m a grown woman. I’m a professional. I’m streetwise. I know what I’m doing.’ She wasn’t sure why those last two statements were necessary. She wasn’t streetwise. She hadn’t been into town for months. She had done all of her shopping online until her connection broke down. Now, she sent her husband to the Tesco Express on his way home from work. She winced at the shock of daylight when she left the house to peg washing out. Her whole life revolved around the computer and she was sick of it. And she clearly didn’t know what she was doing. She was obsessed with a man she’d never met, so obsessed that she’d taken a worker from her ISP company hostage. Those e-mails were the only thing that made her happy, and now they’d stopped. She had nothing left.
‘I didn’t say you were stupid,’ the repairman said.
Rosemary was angry in a way she’d never experienced before. She could feel it setting like a cancer in the pit of her gut. ‘You didn’t say it, no,’ she said. ‘But you meant it, didn’t you?’ When she finished her sentence the room was brilliantly still, the only sound her own breath. The repairman was looking up at her, his spectacles slipping down his nose. Before she could stop herself, she threw the hot tea over his crotch. She then stood there, amazed by her own violence, the mug limp in her hand.
‘Whoa!’ The repairman tried to stand, the handcuffs pulling him back down into the seat. ‘What are you doing, you mad bitch?’ he said, his free hand going to the wet patch on his trousers. He tugged at the material, trying to pull it away from his skin, his eyes wide with shock. ‘You’re not right,’ he said, flailing around in the chair. ‘That tea is boiling hot. It’s burning. I only told you those things for your own safety. I’m burning here. You have to let me go.’ He crossed and uncrossed his legs, like a child who needed the toilet.
Rosemary laughed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to fix my connection first.’
‘Jesus suffering Christ!’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with you? Is it your time of the month, or what?’
‘Not that old chestnut?’ Rosemary said, grinning. ‘I thought you might have come up with something a bit more original.’ Suddenly she was shouting again, her voice going from nought to sixty in under a second. ‘Like fixing my fucking Internet!’ She turned and stomped out of the room.
‘Shit!’ Aaron thought. ‘Why did I have to say that?’ He knew it pissed them off. He used to say it to his wife, and she’d left him. He was scared of what this woman was going to do next. He could hear her footsteps on the floor above him, stamping around. He felt the contour of his mobile phone through the material of his jacket. But he couldn’t dial 999, not without fixing the connection. It would be too obvious that she’d been conned.
He reached for the miniature screwdriver on the floor. He wheeled the chair over to the socket, dragging it with his feet. He held the screwdriver in his left hand, supporting his wrist with his right. He shook as he tried to wedge the tip of it into the nook of the tiny screw. It kept falling out. He pushed further into the corner, the arm of the chair jammed against the wall. He could hear the woman shouting, her words muffled, as he worked the screw anti-clockwise. When the screw couldn’t go any further, he pulled the screwdriver away, the shoulder of his bound arm aching. He should have done this in the first place. The other boys never told him that she was a nut job.
The tea had turned cold now, and his trousers were clinging to his thighs. He saw a small green light on the dongle begin to flash. That was probably it. He was connected. Just to make sure, he went back to the socket and tried to tighten the other screw but it was already wound as tight as it could go. He moved over to the desk and tried to work the mouse with his left hand, the arrow thrashing all over the screen. The woman was on her way down the stairs. He took a deep breath, paused, and then started again. He directed the arrow to the start box in the bottom left corner, instructing the computer to restart. He moved back to his original position, the screwdriver hidden between his soaked thighs.
The woman dropped a roll of brown parcel tape on the desk with a thud.
‘It’s done,’ Aaron said. ‘It’s connected.’
She ignored him. She was fiddling with something in her hand. Aaron bobbed around in the chair, trying to see what it was. It was a box of Tampax. She took two tampons out and then picked the spool of tape up, dropping it on to her arm like a bracelet. She came towards him.
‘I said it’s done,’ he said, holding his free arm up, trying to ward her off. She slapped his arm down. She tried to sit on Aaron’s lap. He moved the chair with his feet, dodging her. ‘I said it’s done!’ he shouted. He reached for the screwdriver and held it in front of him, the handle gripped in his fingers. The woman prised it from his hand and threw it over her shoulder. It landed with a tap on the hallway floor.
She grabbed his hand and tried to push it down on to the arm of the chair. He managed to pull it away. He trapped it beneath his left leg. The woman straddled him.
Behind them the computer was starting up with a fanfare. ‘It’s connected!’ Aaron said. ‘Look, take a look. You can let me go.’
The woman pushed all of her weight down on to his thighs. ‘I’m sorry but I don’t believe you,’ she said.
‘Must be my time of the month. It makes me a bit cynical.’ She held a tampon between her thumb and forefinger and tried to push it into his mouth. ‘No,’ he said, turning his head this way and that, trying to avoid it. A boy at school with him had had to be rushed to casualty with a tampon trapped in his throat. He’d found it in the yard and swallowed it, thinking he could pull it back out by its string. But tampons expanded in water. He couldn’t breathe, and he turned blue.
The woman pinched at his chin, trying to hold his face still.
‘No!’ he said, speaking without fully parting his lips. ‘Come on, I did my job. Don’t do anything silly now. You can let me go.’ He wriggled, trying to fight her off, but she was much stronger than him. She lodged the tampon between his lips and drove it in with her forefinger. Aaron could feel the cotton wool, dry and fluffy against his tongue. He tried to bite down on it but the sensation was ghastly. He hated cotton wool. He retched and she stopped pushing. The tampon was loose in his mouth, balancing on his tongue. He bit down on the string to stop it travelling any closer to his throat.
‘This isn’t silly,’ she said, her voice high and chirpy, the way women talked to babies. ‘You know what was though, don’t you?’
Aaron nodded. There wasn’t much else he could do.
She took the second tampon and roughly thrust it into his mouth. Again he managed to catch it with the string before it got too close to his throat. ‘There we are!’ she said. She took the roll of parcel tape from her wrist and gripped its edge, a thick strand coming away with a rip. She slapped it over his mouth.
The woman stood up and inspected him, smiling proudly at her handiwork. ‘Do you want a biscuit now?’ she said, stepping backwards. ‘You have to try my Viennese Whirls. I make the shortbread myself.’ As she turned her back on him, Aaron pulled his free hand from underneath himself. He reached for the tape covering his mouth and grabbed at a corner, preparing to pluck it away. The weight of his mobile phone was burning a hole in his pocket. The woman heard him shuffling. She turned around and caught his hand. She held his wrist with both hands and pushed his forearm down on to the leather arm of the chair. She sat on it while she pulled the end of the parcel tape from the roll, the tape making a loud screeching noise as the stickiness gave way. She wound it around his arm several times. ‘No!’ Aaron tried to yell, his voice muted by the wadding in his mouth. He had no way of fighting back now.
The woman checked that the tape on his mouth was still secure, slapping it lightly a few times. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Biscuit time. You love a biscuit, don’t you, you repairmen?’
‘Hmmm,’ Aaron said, nodding at the monitor. He was trying to alert her to the Internet icon on the bottom left side of the screen. It was flickering, showing that it was connected.
The woman ignored the gesture. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She waved her hand around her face. ‘I can’t hear you. You’ve got tape over your mouth.’ She took a biscuit from the plate and carried it to him. She held it in front of his mouth for a moment and then pushed it against the tape, the cream and jam smearing out of its sides. She flicked the top off the biscuit and then slapped it down on to Aaron’s cheek. She rolled it over his face like a child pushing a toy car along a grid. He could feel the thick band of jam smearing across his skin, the buttercream getting caught among the stubble on his jaws.
Soon it was clogging every space on his face. He could feel the grittiness of the crumbs in his ear canals. There was buttercream stuffed in his nostrils. There was burgundy-coloured jam smeared on the lenses of his glasses. He couldn’t see anything. All he could smell was its sickly sweet aroma, caught at the back of his throat. He felt like a fly with its wings pulled, trapped in a can of Coke. And his legs were dead from the woman sitting on them. He was so aggravated he began to cry.
‘What’s the matter?’ Rosemary said as she noticed a tear snaking down through the yellowy buttercream spread on the repairman’s face. She lifted his spectacles up and set them on top of his head. ‘It’s not blood. It’s only jam.’ She wiped a dollop of jam from under his eye with the edge of her fingertip. She put it into her mouth, the sugar tingling at her taste buds. ‘See?’
The repairman was staring hard at her, his irises golden. The two blue tampon threads were dangling out of the brown tape like tails. She realised that he couldn’t answer her with his mouth taped up like that, and very suddenly all the fun had trickled out of the situation. She jumped out of his lap and stood looking down at him. ‘This is grievous bodily harm, isn’t it?’ she said. The repairman nodded. Rosemary glanced around the room, at the roll of brown tape and the puddle of cold tea on the floor. What was she going to do now? She had to kill him or let him go.
‘Bloody hell,’ she said, the consequence of her actions dawning on her like thunder. She peeked at the repairman and a whimper came from the back of her throat. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Escape
Behind them the front door was opening. The handle was being pressed down. Somebody was coming in. The repairman looked up expectantly. ‘Shhh!’ Rosemary said, glaring at him. She pressed her index finger against her lips. He blinked and then nodded. She moved towards the office door and peeked outside. Her son was in the hallway, his schoolbag on his shoulder.
‘Danny!’ she said, voice frantic. ‘What are you doing home?’ She squeezed out into the hallway, closing the door behind her. She stood in front of it, guarding the office.
‘Study period,’ Daniel said. He noticed the screwdriver on the floor. ‘What’s this?’ he said. He frowned as he stooped to pick it up. He handed it to his mother.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’ She quickly turned, opened the office door, and threw the screwdriver on to her desk. She flicked the light switch off and then slammed the door closed again. She stood in the doorway, grinning at her son, hands pressed protectively on her hips.
‘Are you OK, Mum?’ Daniel said. He was trying to look past her, through the wooden panels of the door.
‘Fine!’ Rosemary said. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’ She reached up and ruffled her son’s dark hair. It was stiff and tacky with hair gel. Daniel moved away from his mother’s touch. Rosemary wiped her fingers on the thigh of her jeans. ‘Well, let’s get you something to eat,’ she said. She pointed at the kitchen door, expecting her son to move towards it. He didn’t budge. ‘Come on, you must be hungry.’ She pushed him in front of her, following him down the narrow hall.
‘How was school?’ she said, as she opened the fridge door.
Danny sat at the dining table, still wearing his padded jacket. He rolled his eyes. ‘It was school,’ he said, shrugging. ‘What do you expect me to say?’
Rosemary put a block of cheese, an onion, and a cucumber down on the worktop. She reached into the cupboard for a chopping board. ‘I expect you to tell me what subjects you had. I expect you to tell me how your revision is going.’ She took a knife from the cutlery drawer and lopped the end of the onion off.
‘Maths and English,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s what I have every Thursday morning.’ Rosemary peeled the onion at arm’s length, dropping the flakes of papery skin into a small pile on the worktop next to her. ‘But you don’t usually have a study period,’ she said. ‘Are you telling me the truth about that?’
‘Yes!’ Daniel said, offended. ‘Do you think I’m stupid or something? I know you’d ring the school. It’s our chemistry teacher. He’s off sick. They couldn’t get someone to take his place in time.’ He stood up and dropped his bag on the surface of the table. He unzipped it and rummaged around inside. He pulled a sealed letter out. ‘Can I get a stamp from your office?’ he said.
‘No!’ Rosemary stood still, the paring knife in her hand. ‘Get it later. Help me with this sandwich for a minute. Come on, come and butter the bread.’ She waited until Daniel had put the letter down on the table and joined her at the worktop before she started cutting again. ‘What’s it for anyway?’ she said.
Daniel took
four slices of bread out of the bin and laid them on the counter. ‘It’s just an application form,’ he said, ‘for a Christmas job at the supermarket.’ As he opened the carton of margarine, he could feel a strange energy coming from his mother. She was tense as a coiled spring, her hands shaking. He noticed a jam stain on the shoulder of her blouse, two seeds clinging to the material, the red liquid soaking in. ‘What’s that?’ he said.
His mother jumped, her knife catching the tip of her thumb. ‘What?’ she said, twisting around to look at him, her thumb going to her mouth.
‘There’s a stain on your blouse.’ As he spoke he saw the dark mascara ringed around her eyes. ‘Have you been crying, Mum?’
Rosemary shook her head. ‘It’s the onion,’ she said, pointing at it. ‘Get me a plaster please, Danny. There are some blue ones in the First Aid case.’ She ripped a square piece of kitchen roll from the holder and held it over her thumb. Daniel was still standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring at her. ‘In the second cabinet,’ she said, ‘third shelf, quickly!’
Danny put the case down on the worktop and toyed with the plastic catch. ‘It’s a First Aid case,’ he said. ‘Why is it so hard to open?’
Loose Connections Page 4